We can’t take any more orders for delivery this side of Christmas. Our order book is full – well the order book is never full, but we have orders for everything that we can smoke between now and Christmas.

This Sunday, December 10th, the Cork Convivium of Slow Food is having its festive lunch at Deasy’s Pub in Ring near Clonakilty; on their way they will be calling in on us at Inchybridge for a pre-lunch taster. I am just hoping that the weather forecasters have got their predictions all wrong for Sunday!

If anyone is interested in joining in last minute, phone Simone at 021 4505819.

We are madly smoking 7 days a week around the clock, so a brief interlude with maybe just a petite coup of a gorgeous wine from Febvre Wine Merchants will be most welcome!

There are two new speciality food shops opening tomorrow in Ireland, and I am delighted that they are both carrying a range of our products!

The first is a newURRU shop in Mallow which will bring to that town some of the excellence that Bandonians have been raving about for the last couple of years. Willie, brother of Ruth in Bandon, will bring his experience as a Graphic Designer and the benefits of a six month course at Ballymaloe to bear on this exciting project.

The second is in Gorey, Co. Wexford where Christian and Heather Pauritsch open the doors at Partridge Lodge, 93 Main Street, Gorey.

There have been years when I thought that we would run out of wild salmon before Christmas, but we never have until now.

It is with regret that we have had to close our order books for Smoked Wild Salmon as from yesterday, November 28th. Hopefully we have sufficient stock to meet our existing orders, but there will be disappointed customers who have, every year over the last twenty or thirty years, enjoyed Ummera Smoked Wild Salmon at Christmas time.

We do have our very successful Smoked Organic Salmon to replace the wild salmon, so all is not lost.

It is our hope that, by leaving the wild salmon alone for a while, there will be significant increase in the numbers of salmon returning to spawn in the rivers and thus restoring the salmon stocks.

I have had suggested to me that maybe we could by wild salmon from elsewhere, Alaska for instance, or Norway, but we have always smoked Irish Salmon and we are very careful about the provenance of our products. Why ship salmon all the way from Alaska to smoke here? Air miles?

Of course this brings back the question: Is it Smoked Irish Salmon or Irish Smoked Salmon? So much of the salmon that purports to be Irish is more than likely to have been salmon farmed in Scotland, the Shetlands, Norway and probably even Chile.

We can vouch for the fact that our organic salmon comes from Clare Island in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo and our wild salmon came from fishermen in West Cork.

The Irish Food Minister, Brendan Smith, said during the week that “there is only one guarantee that you are buying organic food and that is an official certification from one the Irish organic farming bodies or an approved body in another EU member state. If the seller can’t show you the certification, then you have no assurance whatsoever about what you are buying”.

The Minister continued to say that “we cannot tolerate traders who break the rules”.

Ummera has been an approved producer of Organic Smoked Salmon since April 2002 and we hope that consumers will pay attention to his advice. Here is our Certication for the current year issued by the Organic Trust:

Last night I sent an email out to a number of our contacts in the Cork City area alerting them to our presence at Mahon Market tomrrow, Thursday. I mentioned in the emal our Flor de Sal and it prompted an email asking what Flor de Sal was and then a subsequent one asking if she could buy it online.

So, in a pro-active mood, I added the salt to our online catalogue. And there it is for all to buy!

I guess the waters around here must be pretty troubled given the sound of the wind outside tonight! And more to come on Saturday?